Christopher Cline, the billionaire coal tycoon best known for reviving Illinois’s mining industry and making a fortune doing it, died in a helicopter crash Thursday -- just a day shy of his 61st birthday.

Royal Dutch Shell Plc agreed to sell liquefied natural gas to a Japanese utility at prices that include a link to coal, the latest innovation in the booming LNG market where buyers are seeking to diversify risks.

Negotiators from around the world have opened the United Nations' annual climate change conference in Poland, three years after sealing a landmark deal in Paris that set a goal of keeping global warming well below 2C (3.6F).

Researchers from MIT Sloan School of Management have found that wood pellets burned in European and UK power plants, such as the Drax facility in North Yorkshire - which has transitioned some of its coal power generation capacity to wood pellets with the support of UK government subsidies - actually emit more CO2 per kilowatt hour than that generated by coal.

Coal power plants with a capacity of more than 800 Gigawatt – 10 times the capacity of the whole British electricity system – are currently under construction or in the pipeline. A recent UNEP report has found that none of these plants can be built and existing coal capacity must be retired early if the world is to achieve the climate goals of the Paris Agreement.